minor cases couple put off somewhat MIDNIGHT WATCH ON THE stealth to the main, and kept the affair rather quiet till the knot was tied. Persons who had savings invested them by preference in vessel property. If they amassed any considerable sum, they were apt to move to the main, and embark in a business in some way connected with fish, as the keeping of a market. The women were often out on the hillside mending the great nets damaged in service. In winter they sometimes had knitting bees, at which they replaced the nets of a comrade carried away and destroyed perhaps by fouling a ship's anchor. In winter, too, the residents coasted down the light-house hill; flooded a small valley lying just by the houses, and skated and ran an ice-boat on it. The slight government of the island (plantation in form, and not yet a town) was languidly administered, and offices were avoided, not sought. It was necessary to elect a treasurer (in place of one who had positively refused to serve), and to provide funds for the payment of the glossy-haired teacher, in the neatest of calico dresses with a frill at the throat, from a high school on the main, whose term was drawing near its close. The meeting was set time after time, but no HASCALL." body came, not even the officer who called it, all having regularly hurried off to the water in pursuit of fish. Mackerel and mackerel only was the object of their ambition. It seemed almost an object in itself, apart from what it would bring. In confirmation of this view there was an account of a case, in the good old times, which Monhegan not less than the world in general has enjoyed, when a group was assembled to divide profits amounting to upward of fourteen hundred dollars on recent ventures. Suddenly the signal for mackerel was given. Careless of the business in hand, they caught up a few bills each at random, and put off hurriedly to sea, and the children picked up afterward more than six hundred dollars around the fish-house where this had taken place. There were three seine-boats, owned in shares by their crews, as the custom was. No one on the island could be oblivious of their movements. Its whole life centred round them. They set off for their first trip before daylight, and the voices and knockings at the door in the darkness that summoned the men awakened the settlement. At noon and evening the twenty-four wide, an apparently chaotic careful housewife had the old spy-glass heap of corks and twine, well sprinkled often at her eye, and knew how to regulate with salt for preservation, is piled aft, the laying of the cloth, and the lifting of and two veteran hands stand by to pay it the cover of the boiling pot, to the dot of out. A boy rows in the dory astern. an i, by their rounding the point at the The schools are exceedingly shy. The harbor mouth. But it was their depart- | art is to anticipate, if possible, their direc tion, and meet them with the net. Even then they will dive directly under it, and disappear. The first school is missed, the second, the third, the fourth. The fifth is of great promise, but a single gull comes and poises over it ures by day, after considerable spells of inaction, that were the most animated, and Middleton was glad to be able to share the contagion. STOWING SEINES FROM LAST CATCH. The look-out had been sitting a long time on the cliff, as like a blasted stump in appearance as a man. Suddenly he jumped to his feet, shouted, and came running down. The heavy-booted, flannel-shirted, lounging men knew what it meant, and were down at the beaches and in their long swift boats instantly. Each strove for the lead. How they leaped through the water under the strokes of the bending hickory! Amos has it. No, it is William Henry. No, it is "Cap" Trefeathering, and Middleton is with him. Seven men throw their weight upon the oars, some standing, some sitting. The Cap, aloft on the poop, surveys the watery field, and directs the course with a long steering oar down to the slight rippled patches which to the experienced eye denote the schooling fish. The great seine, one hundred and fifty fathoms long and | to pounce upon a victim. "I wish I had a gun for that fellow," says the Cap, and having none, he swings his hat and screams shrilly; but meanwhile the fish have gone down, and the heavy net must be dragged grumblingly in again without result. Their flocks and herds look down at them at first from the cliffs as they toss in the breakers, but, with many disappointments, they are presently eight to ten miles off from shore. All the boats of the fleet are out around them, full of men, as if meditating some warlike descent on the coast. The cloud of fast yacht-like schooners is tacking and standing off and on in every variety of pose. Dark figures in their tops and shrouds look out for schools; others fling over bait | of ground porgies from boxes along the sides, to "toll" them up for easier capture. Among the rest are two of the singular "porgy steamers" turned to mackereling, in which veterans predict their career will be brief, saying they will roll too much, and their fires be put out. the great horn spoon!" cries an excited share-holder; and they go to dipping the fish out with a scoop-net, and loading the dory as full as it will hold. There were bankers and grand-bankers among the seiners or in the harbor from time to time, for this was well out in the route of all of them. Middleton transThe seas are heavy, and in the crowded ferred his flag from one to another as boats, particularly those of the middle dis- pleased him, like Perry at the battle of tance and the contracted horizon, as they Lake Erie. The vessels outwardly, as a rise on a gloomy wave, with all their fig- rule, were trim and ship-shape; within, ures notched momentarily against the sky, cleanliness or squalor depended upon the before sinking from sight as if ingulfed, individual taste of the captain. Apart Middleton finds a hundred noble and gal- from an occasional "pink-stern," there lant aspects. What an ineffable contrast, was little picturesqueness in the hulls, this free, breezy, stalwart life, to the cramp-and-since the American fisherman deing and tameness and fetid exhalations of spises the picturesque economy of tanned city shops! sails, leaving that to benighted Canadians and French of the Bay of St. Lawrencealmost as little in the upper works. Yonder, again, is a promising school; there are fifty barrels in it if there is a fish. Give way all! The Fidelia's boat sees it too, and so does the Watchman's, the Excalibur's, the Wild Rose's, and that of the Light of the Age, and all race for it. But the Cap and Middleton are there first, and have the pas. Over with the net! The dory holds one end of it while the seine-boat rows around the school. Swash! swash! go the corks, and draw a long, agreeable curve on the water. The two ends are brought together, and the net pursed up. "Bagged, by The routine of affairs on all was much the same. There was breakfast at four in the morning, and three more meals in the course of the day, regulated by the exigencies of the work; besides that, a substantial lunch table stood all day in the forecastle. The cook appeared, indeed, from the financial point of view, to be the best man, since he had a liberal salary in addition to a share of the catch, while the rest depended on the catch alone. In fishing, all hands often took to the boat, leaving only the cook aboard. When they had made a successful cast, they signalled the schooner with an oar. She ran down to them, the seine was made fast to her side, and the fish dipped out on the deck, where they were rapidly dressed and thrown into barrels of brine, one school being disposed of before another was sought, owing to their easy deterioration. At night the island went early to its slumbers, and only the light-house on the hill kept watch. It dazzled the eyes if one looked up, and rendered the darkness more profound. On evenings of a heavy atmosphere slow rays went round and round from it, separating the mist like vast knives. But the fleet at night, with its numerous lanterns (green to port, and red to starboard), and watchmen on deck, was like a little floating city. There was no commodore and no regular organization, yet accidents from collision were They laid their heads all one way, by a tacit agreement. At midnight they reversed, and beat back upon their course. rare. The schools worked nearer the top at night, and their presence was betrayed by a phosphorescent "firing" in the water, so that it seemed something almost like insensate folly that this, instead of the day, was not the favorite time. But attention to the subject showed that the nets fired the water too, and gave a warning much more than counterbalancing the advantage. The desirability of a calm understanding of what you are going to do before you attempt to do it was brought to view by this discovery, and also the evident intention of nature to interpose a certain degree of hardship between the prize and the methods of securing it. Reflecting thus as he was "smacked" back to Portland, soon after, as part of the burden of the "Marthy," Middleton felt that these lessons alone, notwithstanding they might be learned elsewhere, if they were invariably observed and acted upon, were much more than sufficient to repay a desultory jaunt among the fish and men of the Maine islands. THE FAMILY OF GEORGE III. T is interesting to ne construct any genuine life-drama, to pluck from time and oblivion the most inconspicuous story that has a human soul for its basis. But that artificial product of society, royalty, has for us, with our democratic vision and culture, the superadded interest that attaches to the curious and the antique, and we seek to get beneath its trappings and accidents, face to face with its personal aspects, its domestic relations, in a spirit of adventure, as travelling into a sociological domain not intrinsically new, but biassed and made unfamiliar through its unique circumstance. And on this apex of ranks and orders there are degrees of EDITOR'S NOTE.-The portraits accompanying this paper are fac-similes of old engravings from paintings by the best English artists of the latter part of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries. |